Ready, Steady, Curry

While I enjoy making dishes with posh ingredients, it makes my peasant heart happy to do so with common stuff.


On the posh side, we had a simple pasta course at the weekend, just ribbed (for your pleasure, and to pick up the sauce) tubes and a small but expensive tin of black truffle slices in olive oil. Add grated Parmesan and that's it. Delicious.


On the simple side, a recent curry made with dried lentils, loads of sliced onions and garlic, a grated thumb of ginger, and a tin of coconut milk. With spices to perk it up of course. It was slurpy (the lentils cooked to dhal doneness), filling and of course cheap(-ish), and for once I got the spice balance right - a hint of heat, a lot of taste.


As so often the difference in kitchen terms between the two was time. The pasta and truffle thing took 10 minutes. The curry in all needed over an hour - 10 mins to boil the rinsed lentils, 35 more to simmer them, add to the sauteed onions and mix with the coconut milk then bubble gently away for another quarter of an hour to let the ginger, garlic and spices blend in and flavour the whole pan.


I loved both meals, but maybe because I enjoy the faffery, or possibly because the curry cost by my reckoning £2.50 (coconut milk from the Indian supermarket undercuts Messrs Sainsbury and Aldi by about 33%) it was the latter that pleased me most.